On 12th September (local time), a self-proclaimed UFO-logist and journalist Jaime Maussan sent a shockwave to the world as he presented two ‘mummified’ bodies of “non-human” corpses to the Mexican Congress. The presenters at the hearing claimed that by using DNA testing, the researchers were able to prove the alleged ‘alien’ bodies were not from Earth. Notably, Maussan has a history of creating hoaxes.
‘Aliens’ presented at the Congress
Two alleged alien bodies were presented at the Mexican Congress on 12th September. They were small, mummified bodies with elongated heads. Both of them had three fingers and had striking similarities to how the film industry, especially Hollywood, depicts them. The presenters claimed that the bodies were found in Peru in 2017. Furthermore, Maussan claimed the bodies were around 1,000 years old.
According to Maussan, the bodies were found in algae mines. He claimed the Autonomous National University Of Mexico researchers found “eggs” in one of them during examination.
The director of the Scientific Institute for Health of the Mexican Navy, José de Jesús Zalce Benítez, was one of the presenters during the hearing. He presented scans of the alleged alien corpses and claimed that they had retractable necks, large brains, no teeth and big eyes with capabilities of “wide stereoscopic vision.”
Stereoscopic vision can be defined as a system to determine the depth of an object using two cameras or a set of eyes. All living beings with eyes have different widths of stereoscopic vision. The width of stereoscopic vision defines how much area the eyes can cover. It is known as the field of vision. While humans have roughly 130-degree degrees of vision, dogs and cats have around 50 degrees, horses have around 350-degree and so on.
X’s community notes, a service that ‘fact check’s and adds context to popular posts, has also added a note over the claims of the ‘alien mummies’, saying that the Nazca aliens are a hoax promoted multiple times by a particular group of people. A detailed report by LiveScience in 2018 explained how those ‘mummies’ were created by different body parts. Codigooculto had called the elaborate hoax a ‘crime against Peruvian culture’.
Questionable background of the presenters
In 2015, Maussan reported to have found an alien body in Peru. However, it was later debunked as a mummified corpse of a human child.
In 2017, the Ministry of Culture of Peru examined the “extraterrestrial mummy” that was found in Nazca. The researchers called it “one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century, ” but the Ministry of Culture disagreed. In a statement, Dr Blanca Alva, then-director of the General Directorate of Heritage Defense of the Ministry of Culture, said after reviewing the mummies, it was highly likely that they were recently created and had no archaeological significance. As the location where the alleged mummies were found was unknown, it was not possible to determine whether it was an archaeological site.
Furthermore, the Ministry of Culture recommended filing a case against the alleged “excavations” by the “researchers” at the archaeological site. The director of the Scientific Institute for Health of the Mexican Navy, José de Jesús Zalce Benítez also has a history of being debunked over alien claims. He was one of the lead researchers in the presentation of the “alien” bodies that was debunked later.
In 2018, researchers debunked Maussan’s claims that the mummies he found in Nazca were non-human or alien in nature. They pointed out that the mummies were “created” using the dogs’ skulls. “To carve this elongated head, they had to remove the snout and all the teeth. A false skin was put on that,” the researchers noted. Furthermore, the researchers said the bodies were made using parts of the skeleton. They had no joints, and the three fingers correspond to human children and adults.